What Are Your Views on Adam and Eve?

Faith & Science Conversation
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  • Adam and Eve as Recent Ancestors
  • Adam and Eve as Ancient Ancestors
  • Adam and Eve as Recent Representatives
  • Adam and Eve as Ancient Representatives
  • Genealogical Adam and Eve from Whom We Are All Descended
  • Non-historical Adam and Eve
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A question for clarification: what do you mean with recent vs. ancient?
Does recent mean <10’000 years and ancient more than that?

I assume that with ‘ancestor’ you mean genetic ancestor,
and with ‘representative’ that there lived also other humans during that time (outside of Eden).

Also the difference between ‘representative’ and ‘non-historical’ may be vague if we think of mythologized history where such persons (A&E) lived but their story has been modified much to make it a suitable teaching for the purpose of the writer - in the Ancient Near East there was no expectation that narratives were accurate reports of what happened. Some amount of exaggeration and adding of mythological elements were probably ‘normal’ if that helped to clarify the message (hitting the mark).

My own view is still uncertain. I see mythological elements in the narrative but that does not exclude the possibility that the narrative is based on two actual persons who once moved in a garden or garden-like environment that was considered to be sacred or belonging to God/god.

If it is mythologized history, the event probably happened within the last 10’000 years. If it originates from Mesopotamia, then probably within 7’000 years (crude age of known civilization in the area of Sumer). If it was from elsewhere, then probably within 12’000 years. The latter figure comes from the age of the oldest ruins (Tell Qaramel in Syria with tower structures 10’000+ years BCE; Karahan Tepe in Turkiye crudely 10’000 years) and the signs of continuous inhabitation at Jericho (11’000 years).

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Perhaps the notion of representatives needs clarification.
The narrative contains certain intents and theological notions that are not universally accepted.

Richard

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None of the above, Adam and Eve were the 1st Creatures to be able to Pray to “Our Father”.

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I would clink on “I don’t know” if an option, but gave my two most likely guesses, leaning heavily towards non-historical. It will be interesting to see the results.

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I’ve always heard it that recent would mean more along the timescale of young earth creationists or maybe Swamidaas’ genealogical Adam and Eve interpretration. Ancient would be more in line with the arrival of the first humans according to mainstream science.

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When we are speaking about Adam and Eve in Eden, I choose the poll option “Non-historical Adam and Eve.”

I take the Eden account to refer to a real ontological and personal reality belonging to a different mode of existence, expressed through earthly imagery. In my reading, Eden is real, but it is not simply an episode of ordinary terrestrial biological history. It represents a distinctive, not fully reconstructable mode of created personal existence in immediate relation to the Creator.

In Eden, the Adamic and Eveic distinctions are real within one personal ground, but they are not yet two biological human beings. I do not identify these distinctions with male and female sex, nor do I assign to them the roles of an active and a receptive principle. The distinction is real, but its precise metaphysical character remains open.

When the account moves into earthly human history, I choose “Genealogical Adam and Eve from Whom We Are All Descended.”

Here Adam and Eve are two independent embodied persons, each with a distinct body, biography, perspective, freedom, and responsibility. Each bears the full imprint of the same Edenic personal ground, including both the Adamic and Eveic distinctions. In more familiar Christian language, this full personal imprint corresponds to the individual human soul.

In this model, Adam and Eve are not the first members of Homo sapiens. They appear within an already existing wider population as the first two embodied persons in human history. With them begins the earthly human personal line, which then gradually spreads genealogically through the wider population. In this sense, Eve can genuinely stand at the genealogical beginning of the later human line, even though the biological species itself does not begin from a single pair.

This reading also offers one way of thinking about the inherited consequences of the Fall. If the Fall wounds the Edenic personal ground itself, later human beings need not be understood as personally guilty of the Edenic transgression itself. They receive their personal existence through a ground whose relation to the Creator is already wounded. On this reading, what is inherited is not someone else’s act or someone else’s guilt, but a wounded condition of the human personal line.

I do not think the text of Genesis itself describes the metaphysical mechanism of this connection. This is my attempt to understand how the Fall in Eden may be related to the later condition of the human personal line.

So for me, the two poll options refer to two different moments of the same account: the Edenic origin and wounding of the one personal ground, followed by its embodiment in two earthly persons and the further genealogical spread of the human personal line.

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I personally see the concept of Adam and Eve more as story-telling by the early Israelites to tell us about God. Genesis is fun and has a lot of wisdom, but doesn’t exactly match with our modern understanding of our evolutionary genealogy. So, I voted non-historical.

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My views on Adam and Eve stem from:

  • The Magisterium.
  • The belief of the Church the last 2,000 years including early Christians and Jews.
  • OT Biblical genealogies which don’t make sense as pure fiction
  • The Genesis account itself which does not read like complete myth to me
  • The NT genealogy that exists in an ancient bios/historiographic work (Luke-Acts).
  • Paul’s (who was specially appointed by Jesus) punctiliar arguments are best understood as referring to a real person and fall apart without one. In fact, I think this is essential to Paul’s understanding of atonement.

In The Lost World of Adam and Eve, John Walton writes:

“Studies in the ancient world have concluded that genealogies typically are more interested in political unity than in lineage ties, but as such their objectives would not be achieved if imaginary or legendary characters were used. Future discoveries may yet provide an example that could lead to a different conclusion, but based on the information currently available, genealogies from the ancient world contain the names of real people who inhabited a real past. Consequently there would be no precedent for thinking of the biblical genealogies differently. By putting Adam in ancestor lists, the authors of Scripture are treating him as a historical person.”

“The New Testament views the reality of sin and its resulting need for redemption as having entered at a single point in time (punctiliar) through a specific event in time and space. Furthermore, Paul correlates that punctiliar event with a corresponding act of redemption: the death of Christ with its resulting atonement— also a punctiliar event. “

I find many Christians severely undervalue the gravity of the bullet points above. The dismissal of a literal Adam and Eve is far too cavalier as many Christians mistakenly think they have to choose between a literal Adam and evolution. This is not true. These same Christians also often think like materialists and define humanity in the same limited way that a scientist would: entirely physical which is a dubious view. They undervalue the spiritual and immaterial aspects of humanity (e.g. the soul) in such discussions and usually operate in an outdated mechanistic framework that is hundreds of years old.

Vinnie

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Perfect.

Perfect.

Perfect.

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None of the above. If I had to reduce my view to a line in a poll, it might be something like

Characters in an authoritative story.

It doesn’t really matter to me if they were historical figures, it matters that the story is from God and teaches something He wanted us to learn.

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I think Adam and eve are historical but ancient i don’t have a PhD in OT studies or in Evolutionary Biology I’ve read a lot of science and faith books and I’m a huge fan the language of God podcasts so take my theory with pitch of salt. just my two cents

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I do think that Adam and Eve had to have been historical in some way since they are ancestors of Jesus, but I don’t think that means they need to have been the first literal ancestors of all living humans, though they could have been if they lived far back enough. The problem with making them the first literal ancestors of all humans is they may have had to have lived millions of years ago. This means they would have to have been more like non-human great apes than modern humans, which doesn’t seem supported by scripture. My view tends towards saying they were the first “spiritually modern” humans, meaning the first to have a covenant relationship with God.

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I gave a vote to Adam and Eve as ancient representatives, but not in the sense of two literal people chosen from a larger population to represent them all. Instead, I think the story of Adam and Eve represents the complex multigenerational journey of early humanity and also represents each individual person. The first is a kind of history (but focused on revealing God’s involvement in ways that wouldn’t be picked up by flat historical chronicle) while the second is a kind of prophecy that reveals our nature as human beings.

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I couldn’t agree more!

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What I mean to say by my vote is that Adam and Eve were probably real people in ancient Mesopotamia but the way they function in the story is that they represent all of humanity male and female as a whole, kind of like archetypes.

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What is meant by “genealogical Adam and Eve from whom we are all descended”? and how is that different from “Adam and Eve as Ancient Ancestors”? and how is that different from “Adam and Eve as recent ancestors?”

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Good question. It’s the theory that Adam and Eve aren’t the only original ancestors, but that we each share a bit of them–sort of like many of us are from Charlemagne, I guess. The idea in that case keeps a foot in 2 stories–with being a descendant of Adam and Eve, you still get the Fall, but also ancestors with genes from others present at the time they existed, if you take the genes/evolutionary history into account. Others can put it better than I.
The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry: Swamidass, S Joshua: 9781514003831: Amazon.com: Books

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I don’t want to read a book on it. Your explanation is what i needed. Thanks!

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Maybe the “all descended part” is what separates them?

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